


(I'm unhinged and you're undone)

by Bambie



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Behavior, Episode: s04e20 That Old Corpse, Episode: s05e07 Ace Chemicals, Eventual Smut, Frottage, Jealousy, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Jeremiah Valeska, The Jerome/Bruce is past and unresolved, Unhealthy Relationships, and canon-typical responses to jealousy, or as i call it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:15:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27767350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bambie/pseuds/Bambie
Summary: It's jealousy, as bitter and corrosive as the acid below them, and Bruce can only watch Jeremiah drown in it.Or:Four times Jerome Valeska came between Bruce Wayne and Jeremiah Valeska, and the one time he brought them together.
Relationships: Jeremiah Valeska/Bruce Wayne, Jerome Valeska/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 24
Kudos: 100





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Statari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Statari/gifts).



> Title is from 'Lemon to a Knife Fight' by the Wombats.
> 
> _I kick, and you like to punch,  
>  I'm unhinged and you're undone,  
> I'm not getting out of here alive,  
> I brought a lemon to a knife fight. ___  
>  _  
>  _Some lines lines you might recognise are from 4.20 "That Old Corpse" and 5.07 "Ace Chemicals."_  
>  ___  
> With thanks to the incomparable Statari for fanning the flames of my obsession with this duo with their 'A Demon' series and ceaselessly cheering me on. This is all for you, Statari!

_i._

In the beginning, they meet in the heart of a labyrinth.

Led by Ecco, bracketed by Detective Gordon and Lucius, Bruce follows the intricate, winding paths of fear made concrete and steel to the workshop where Jeremiah Valeska stands to meet them, a spider trapped in his own web. After seeing the maze, after seeing him, Bruce isn't surprised by the refusal to face Jerome. He meanders further through the workshop, this visualisation of Jeremiah's mind, until he knows just the thing to say. 

He watches Jeremiah's eyes shift, closed stare relaxing, softening, burning in a way that puts him right back in a maze of mirrors, so like the labyrinth around them now, as Jerome laughed, gasping, _that’s it, let it out_ , with such a bizarre, rasping intimacy that Bruce dreams of it still. 

He speaks of a life without fear, and Jeremiah's self-preservation does the rest.

He offers his hand, and Jeremiah accepts it. 

Bruce loses sight of Jeremiah on the stage when Jerome fills the space between them, the face the two brothers had once shared scarred worse than ever by the vicious blows Bruce had dealt in the maze, and catches sight of him again only afterwards beside Jerome's fallen body. Almost a shadow in the flashing police lights. Outside his bunker for the first time in years.

In that moment, Bruce thinks it's one of the bravest things he has ever seen anyone do. 

(Later, he will know, everything that follows is on him.)

_ii._

One night, when the shadows in the bunker grow soft and long to mimic the far away world above ground, Bruce tells Jeremiah: "I hope you don't mind my coming here so often. I don't intend to keep looking over your shoulder, but I do find your work fascinating."

At the sound of his voice, Jeremiah's head turns fully towards him.

They're sitting around Jeremiah's drafting table in an increasingly common moment of relaxation, surrounded by generator schematics. Weeks ago the chair Bruce sits in now was hauled against the side of Jeremiah's drafting table by the engineer when he'd invited Bruce to take a closer look at a particularly clever schematic. In the end, Bruce's visit had lasted for hours until an irate phone call from Alfred finally drew Bruce back into the outside world. When Jeremiah invited him back a few days later to continue their discussion, the chair had still been there, waiting for him. 

Which Bruce realises perhaps accounts for the way Jeremiah blinks in surprise at his words, before his mouth twists in wry amusement. "Of course I don't mind, Bruce. I certainly would have said otherwise before now if I did." His brow furrows faintly, before he adds earnestly, "I hope I haven't made you feel unwelcome."

"Of course not," Bruce assures him hurriedly. "It's just I wouldn't want to impose."

"You aren't." Jeremiah's expression was earnest in the dimmed bunker lights, gaze moving over Bruce's face in a way that makes something in his chest snag strangely. After a moment, the other man glances away and clears his throat carefully. "And . . . if I am honest, I would much prefer to disclose my designs to you personally rather than anyone else. I wouldn't like anyone but the two of us to know so much about the work we've been doing. It isn't that I don't trust Wayne Enterprises, of course, Bruce."

"But?" 

Jeremiah hesitates. As close as they are, in the soft light and deep shadows cast by the desk lamp, Bruce notices for the first time the dark, strangely inscrutable green of Jeremiah's eyes.

How often they flicker away from him, as if forced, and then back again, inescapably, inevitably, drawn into Bruce's orbit. 

"But I don't really know them as well as I do you, Bruce."

For a moment all Bruce can hear is what Jeremiah doesn't quite dare to say: _I don't trust them as much as I do you_. 

Bruce has always known Jeremiah Valeska is a paranoid man. One who builds intricate cages around himself with his brilliant mind. His willingness to put that very same intelligence, the one thing he has most relied on through all those years of terror, in Bruce's hands leaves him swallowing around a surge of protectiveness, sharp and keening.

It's an ache he wants to live with.

When that clears Bruce still finds that he can't blame Jeremiah for his paranoia when his words bring forth so many recollections of Bruce's own experience with corruption. While Bruce trusts Lucius absolutely, he cannot say the same for others at his company. Certainly not to the same extent as he trusts Jeremiah. 

Jeremiah, who had walked Bruce through assembling parts of the prototype for the generators. Who had leaned so attentively over Bruce's shoulder to murmur instructions in his ear. Who had only smiled at Bruce's questions and so tenderly said: "I want you to have a proper hand in what we're building together."

How could Bruce deny Jeremiah's desire for secrecy after that?

It isn't like Bruce has never trusted the wrong person before, after all.

So he nods before the silence can linger on. "It's alright. I . . . I can understand why you would prefer to keep this between us as much as possible." Bruce's chest was still warm from the revelation of Jeremiah's trust in him, the depth of it. It makes the cool bunker air seem strangely hot so Bruce begins to roll up his sleeves. He tries to focus his attention back on the generators, not on the way Jeremiah's eyes track his movement. Not on the way his heart flutters. 

"I've already restricted access to this project on the Wayne Enterprises severs. Only the two of us have full access-- " Bruce begins, but he gets no further than that. 

To Bruce's alarm, Jeremiah's loosened posture abruptly stiffens.

"Jeremiah?" Bruce's first lurching thought is of the wall of camera behind him, but when he looks, he sees only the grainy forest scenery. "Did you see something?"

"Not on the cameras," Jeremiah replies distractedly. Like he can't help himself, Jeremiah leans in so suddenly across the drafting table Bruce barely catches his own flinch in time. Knuckles whitening on top of the schematics, Jeremiah's hand twitches as if to pin Bruce's arm before the splinters of his usual composure catch the gesture in its tracks. In an unexpectedly intent tone, Jeremiah continues: "The scars on your arm. They almost look like snake bites, but they're too small and deep."

Unsettled by this sudden intensity, Bruce follows Jeremiah's stare. He feels a sudden pang of dread. 

In the desk light, the scars from Jerome's staple gun are clearly visible on the inside of his arms, as dark and distinct as they've been every night Bruce has found himself studying them in the dark of his bedroom. Inescapable reminders of that awful night when the lights Gordon had promised him had all gone out. 

"They're not from a snake," Bruce confirms stiffly, although Jeremiah's tone had already been so certain. "They're nothing."

When he goes to roll his sleeve back down, Jeremiah's hand catches his wrist lightly. Bruce stills, eyes darting up to the other man's face in surprise. Jeremiah's expression was darkening, and the turn of his head to stare down at the unmistakable scars on Bruce's wrist shields the rest of the other man's expression from view.

For a long silent moment, Jeremiah inspects the scars. 

The thought of telling Jeremiah about that night makes Bruce's blood wash cold. But he has a creeping suspicion Jeremiah is too well-versed in Jerome's crimes not to put the pieces together. 

"In one of Jerome's seedy little broadcasts, he had staples in his face." Jeremiah's tone goes low and flat, clipped. Bruce watches the way his throat moves when the engineer draws in a slow breath so he doesn't have to meet his eyes. "The marks looked a lot like these. It was _him_. He marked you with these."

 _Marked_ you.

The odd choice of words rings in Bruce's ears. Intimate in a way that makes those very scars tingle with an odd prickling heat, burning hotter still when Jeremiah's hand trails to brush the worst of them, a finite tremble in his fingertips that Bruce doesn't know how to calm.

"Jeremiah . . . "

"Where else?" Jeremiah says abruptly, soft voice roughening. "I know my brother. He'd never stop at just this. He never could stop himself from trying to ruin . . . good things."

"That was the only one on the night the lights went out," Bruce admits carefully. He should stop there. He shouldn't give Jeremiah more to worry himself over. But, for the first time since seeing the scars, Jeremiah's eyes gravitate back to Bruce's face, thumb covering the scar as if to erase it, and a flicker of tenderness at the strained control Jeremiah exerts over his expression draws the truth from Bruce's mouth. "There's another on my neck from the first time we met, just before he first died. He held a knife to my throat."

"That doesn't surprise me. He held one to mine too, a cake knife on my tenth birthday."

Bruce almost grimaces at the thought of that, at the strangely wooden tone of Jeremiah's voice, as if reciting from an old script.

All the intensity that should be in such a horrible memory is in the way Jeremiah's eyes drag down from Bruce's own eyes to his mouth to his throat, until it feels almost like a physical weight resting on the veil of his sweater neck, searing his skin from behind the shield of Jeremiah's own glasses.

For a breathless, dizzying moment, Bruce thinks Jeremiah might reach for that too, might lay the touch burning still upon the last mark Jerome had left upon the very first, that Jeremiah's clever, steady hands might brush across the tingling skin of Bruce's throat and linger there.

(That Bruce might let him. Might want him too. Might tilt his head and touch Jeremiah right back.)

"I'm sorry that happened to you," Bruce says softly.

"I'm sorry too. That Jerome was ever able to touch you." Jeremiah's stare lingers on Bruce’s neck and then travels back to his face. Whatever he sees through Bruce's carefully contained expression makes him lick his lips. "Bruce, I -- "

But, discarded on the tabletop, Bruce's phone buzzes gently, severing through the moment. 

Jeremiah's fingers twitch over his scars, and the other man swallows, blinks, withdraws.

"I'm sorry," Jeremiah repeats, a little abruptly, drawing back into his calculated composure in that reluctant way of his. "I shouldn't have --" His eyes flicker back to Bruce's bare forearm, and, as if unable to voice an apology for touching him, Jeremiah straightens his shoulders. Something strangely like resentment twists his lips for a blink before smoothing back into his usual, mild, controlled expression. "I hope I didn't make you uncomfortable. Do you need to get that?"

"No." If it's important, then Alfred, Selina, and Detective Gordon know to call him. "And it's fine," Bruce adds. "Are you alright?" 

His eyes catch on the flex of Jeremiah's fingers on the table between them, a compulsive movement at odds with the other man's general state of careful composure before today. Like he wants to reach for Bruce, curl his fingers around his wrist, and hold on tight.

Bruce wonders how long it's been since Jeremiah touched another human being.

When Bruce had offered him his hand, when Jeremiah had accepted it?

He feels his own hand twitch. 

But Jeremiah's earnest voice calls his attention away. "Yes. Of course. I only -- I only wish you'd never had to suffer my brother, Bruce. That he'd never left those marks on you."

Bruce almost relaxes at how Jeremiah seems to calm as their conversation shifts from the scars Jerome had left behind on him. 

( _T_ _he scars they had left behind on each other_.)

And then, after a moment, the engineer looks down and adds in a peculiarly even voice: "You must be very glad he's dead now."

 _I should be glad_ , Bruce thinks distantly, glancing down at the small but deep scars on his arm: trailing up his arm like toothmarks bitten into his skin. He should be glad Jerome is dead, that he can never hurt anyone -- never hurt Jeremiah -- never hurt Gotham again -- 

But instead Bruce flexes his hand again. He feels the phantom bite of the mirror shard across his left palm, hears the hoarse rasp of Jerome's ruined voice as he'd laughed, remembers the strange, burning light in Jerome's eyes beneath him and over the barrel of a gun in that diner. 

_(No one ever helped me.)_

Jerome was a killer, a terrorist who had hurt so many people. His had been the face of Bruce's own darkness, the worsened, crooked scars after the maze testament to Bruce's own capacity for terrible violence. More even than the wet sound of the dagger piercing Ra's al Ghaul's chest over the past year, the memory of Jerome's laughter reminded him of his failure, his shattered control, that silent broken promise made above him to never kill. 

Jerome is the last shadow to haunt Bruce, even still, from the night the lights went out.

Bruce should be glad Jerome is dead, but he isn't. 

"I could have killed him once," Bruce admits. Jeremiah's eyes flare at the admission. In surprise, Bruce tells himself. "The last time he kidnapped me. But I couldn't do it."

"Why didn't you?"

 _Because I'm nothing like him. Because there are good people in Gotham. Because it was the right thing to do_.

Those were the answers he would give to Selina, and Alfred, and Gordon if they had ever actually known or asked what he had almost become in that maze of mirrors with Jerome. Bruce opens his mouth to deliver them, those gentle half-truths, but his eyes catch on Jeremiah's face.

Maybe it was because of that memory that those almost-lies, lingering on Bruce's tongue like a mouthful of blood, fell away. Bruce's mind tips back into that moment of honesty when his eyes had caught on the mirror -- as they catch now upon Jeremiah -- to see all the carefully chosen differences and potent similarities reflected back at him with Jerome, laughing beneath him. 

Instead Bruce says: "Because he wanted me to."

_And because I wanted it too._

Jeremiah's eyes widen, his lips part, and he's staring again, as if Bruce is something entirely, wonderfully, new to his eyes. And there's that fascination, the very same as the day that they met, blazing brighter and softer in different ways.

No one has ever looked at him in quite the same way, and Bruce feels his blood burn hot enough to match. 

"I'm sorry," Bruce murmurs, heart pounding. "I know it would have made things easier for you, if I had."

But Jeremiah is looking at him as if it was all worth it, as if a light was shining on his face from far away. "No," he manages breathlessly after a moment. Bruce can see him attempting to blink back into himself, can see him fail, can see him all. Jeremiah's voice bleeds a little rougher again. "Certainly it would have made certain possibilities open up for me sooner, but it would have closed some for me as well. Despite Jerome's influence, I would not have changed anything that has led us here." In a softer voice, Jeremiah looks away and adds, "I'm . . . glad that you're here, Bruce."

In the pit of Bruce's stomach, something both tightens and warms, electrifying and soothing, anticipation and joy.

"Me too, Jeremiah," Bruce says sincerely. 

_iii._

It isn't that Bruce has ever forgotten that Jeremiah is Jerome's brother, but it's been so long since he's compared the two that at first, when Selina scoffs at Bruce's mention of how close the generators were to a test run, it takes him a moment to parse why until she says with her particular brand of abrasive concern: "Wait. You're _still_ hanging out with that psycho's brother?"

Bruce sighs. "Jeremiah is nothing like his brother."

Selina's brow arches at him. "For your sake, I hope not. Jerome Valeska nearly _killed_ you a whole bunch of times, remember?"

 _So did your friend_ , _Tabitha,_ Bruce thinks, but it isn't a helpful thought so he bites it back. "I remember that Jerome also nearly killed Jeremiah. They might look alike, but they're different where it counts. He could have died helping us stop Jerome, Selina."

"Well, it sounds to _me_ like he didn't have much choice if Jerome was already gunning for him." 

"Maybe not, but he did the right thing when it counted." 

Did it really matter that Jeremiah was clever enough to know Jerome would never stop now that he'd found him, that Bruce himself had played on his self interest at the prospect of living free in a world without his brother, when he'd rose so brilliantly above his fear in the end?

When in the end Jeremiah had been everything Bruce hopes Gotham could one day be? 

"If you say so, Bruce." Selina eyes him doubtfully, and Bruce stops himself from frowning back at her. It isn't her fault that she's only known of Jerome and never Jeremiah. Selina has always been his dearest friend, and she's only worried about him. _Baselessly_ , Bruce adds forcefully, ignoring the strange twist in his gut. Finally, Selina relents with a sigh, "Fine. You know him best. But maybe you should ask Alfred for _his_ opinion."

In the silence that follows, the spectre of Silver St. Cloud hangs between them like a ghost.

In the end Bruce doesn't get the chance to ask Alfred, not after the whole mess with Tabitha and Barbara. But Selina's words, the memory of Silver, continuously drift back to Bruce's mind. Until on the day of the trial for the generators Bruce can no longer stand for it to taint his -- their -- joy. 

"Alfred?"

"Something wrong, Master B?" Glancing up at the clock from where he's kneading a dough of bread, Alfred frowns. "Hang about much longer and you'll be late for your meeting with Jeremiah." 

Bruce almost grimaces. He already knows, with the drive to the bunker, that he's going to be late, but he persists, "He's what I wanted to talk to you about, actually."

Alfred's hands still. After a second, he asks mildly, "He done something then?"

"No. It's something Selina said -- she's worried about Jerome."

"Ah," says Alfred understandingly. "Well. Can't say I blame her, Master Bruce. I won't waste my breath telling you not to be friends with him. God knows you never listen to me as it is. But, because of who his brother was, because of who _he_ is -- " Bruce draws his breath to protest, but Alfred shakes his head and finishes grimly; "-- There's always going to be a shadow between you."

 _Jeremiah isn't like Jerome_ , Bruce almost says, but there's something in Alfred's eyes that stops him cold before he can speak it aloud past the strange knot in his throat. 

Instead Bruce shakes his head slowly. "You're right. I'm going to be late." But, when Bruce turns to leave, he pauses in the doorway, unable to leave this one truth unsaid. "Alfred? He's my friend."

He leaves before Alfred can respond. 

The drive to Jeremiah's bunker passes quickly under the shadow of Alfred and Selina's words. The shadow stalks him through the familiar underworld labyrinthine halls towards Jeremiah's domain and deepens significantly when he's buzzed through to find Jeremiah, in an unsettling bookend to their very beginning, turning to face him with the faintest traces of a frown that disappears on scrutiny, and a glass of whiskey in his hand that does not. Like he's bracing himself for something. 

"Ah Bruce." Jeremiah smiles, and for some reason, Bruce feels strangely unsettled by it as he edges further into the room, towards the prepared generator, at its very heart. "I was beginning to worry something happened on the drive."

"No, I'm so sorry I'm late. Something -- came up with Alfred."

"No need to apologise. I understand if you have other commitments," Jeremiah says mildly. His eyes flicker in an oddly similar way to how they had when he had held Bruce's wrist and stared down at the scars. "I do hope Mr Pennyworth is well?"

Bruce hesitates. It feels wrong to speak of it any further, even without divulging anything of what he and Alfred -- he and Selina -- had discussed. He can't help but remember the disdain in Jeremiah's eyes at how Lucius flinched at the sight of his face and Jim stiffened on the day they met. 

"Alfred's fine," Bruce settles on in the end. 

But, before he can shift the subject back to the generator, Jeremiah's quick mind seems to have discerned the reason for Bruce's reticence. Head tilting faintly in thought, Jeremiah let out a faint, "Ah," noise. "Does he want you to stay away from me, Bruce?" Jeremiah asks softly. 

A prickle moves across Bruce's back in response as if there was something deceptive in the mild tone: in the way his friend's jaw shifts as he lifts the whiskey glass to his lips, mouth twitching briefly: in the intensity in his eyes. As if there was something terrible and dangerous had crept into the room without Bruce's awareness.

 _It's only Jeremiah_ , Bruce reminds himself forcefully. 

Still he has to lick his suddenly dry lips before he speaks. "They don't know you like I do," Bruce says simply, remembering once, weeks ago now, when Jeremiah had said something similar.

Jeremiah pauses, and the whiskey glass lowers in recognition, soothed. "No, Bruce," Jeremiah agrees lowly, lips curling up at the corners. "I don't think anyone knows me as well as you will."

But there's something strange, almost foreboding, lingering thick in the air between them as they set up the generators, persisting even as the air burns a soft, exquisite blue, around them. It's a tension Bruce can't shake, catching in his stomach even through his awe, even through the rush of heat at every furtive look he catches from Jeremiah, and it's one he cannot parse until Jeremiah's confession materialises it between them. 

Jerome's journal. The final trick. The insanity gas. 

( _It’s the ones who are closest to you that you have to keep your eye on._ )

There's a part of Bruce that wants to step back from this newest development.

But in the same way sparing Jerome's life had made his actions Bruce's responsibility, so had convincing, even manipulating, Jeremiah out of the bunker and up on that stage made everything that had happened to him that day -- the terror, the kicks and punches, the gas -- Bruce's failure. 

Beyond that, Jeremiah is his friend. Not something contagious to be cringed away from, as if any of this is _Jeremiah's_ fault.

Instead Bruce edges closer to Jeremiah, taking in the nervous flicker of his eyes; the way he swallows like he's holding back an anxious laugh; the minute softening of the other man's shoulders in relief the closer Bruce gets. Even when he proposes they go to the graveyard, to prove Jerome really is dead.

"Do you really think that will work?" Jeremiah asks, still so uncertain.

"I do. And even -- " Bruce falters at the thought of Jerome, but, for Jeremiah's sake, he swallows back the confusing storm of emotion and carries on: "Even _If_ Jerome were still alive, then he wouldn't expect us to go there together, would he? We'll face it together. I'll be with you the whole time, if that's what you want."

Something cracks open in Jeremiah's eyes.

For a moment, Jeremiah appears almost overcome, eyes riveting on Bruce, throat bobbing.

Like this simple promise is everything he's wanted to hear for years and years. 

"I do. I do want that. Bruce, that's exactly I want," Jeremiah manages. There's something nearly raw in his face, and Bruce feels suddenly, awfully, helpless as he once had in Crime Alley, curling over the bodies of his parents with no more idea of how to help them than he has for Jeremiah now.

( _How lonely has he been_ ? Bruce thinks. _How lonely have I?)_

"You don't know what it was like, living underground, for all those years," Jeremiah adds in a breathless tone that makes Bruce's stomach coil so tightly it hurts. Somehow this feels like the most honest thing Jeremiah has ever said to him. "And then you came along and offered me everything I could dream of."

"You aren't alone anymore, Jeremiah," Bruce tells him quietly. "I promise."

It's too much, the way Jeremiah looks at him then: this frantic attention.

Bruce almost can't look at him.

Bruce can't look away from him. 

Not even when the end comes, when Jeremiah is ripped away from him by the Maniax as soon as they set foot in the graveyard, when they're shoved before Jerome's open grave, when Jeremiah rises above it and smiles at him with his face finally scrubbed bare of blood and make-up and lies all.

"Everything," Bruce chokes. On bile, on mortification at his own stupidity, on the aching, tearing, familiarity of grief. "Everything you said, back in the bunker . . . "

"True," Jeremiah says earnestly. "All of it. Every single word, Bruce. I truly hadn’t expected you to be so open to me. I had, in fact, prepared a very different plan for us today – but you improved on things significantly. I hadn't considered that possible.” Bruce strains to be free, but the Maniax grip him too tightly, pinning him in place for Jeremiah to move in close. With the veil of his contact lenses removed, Jeremiah's acidic eyes are scorching with intensity, reverent and joyful. “You truly are my very best friend.”

 _That was all a lie,_ Bruce wants to spit. But a thousand little moments he's dismissed flash before his eyes. Jeremiah's strange intensity at the sight of his scars. The odd tone in his voice when he'd asked about his own brother's death. The creeping alarm when Bruce had stepped into the bunker this morning. 

It was worse than a lie. It was his own blindness, his refusal to see, that has allowed this to happen. Allowed Jim Gordon to die, like his parents, for Bruce's inaction. 

( _I want you to have a proper hand in this_ , Jeremiah whispers in his memory. _This_ , the generator he'd detonated with Jim Gordon still inside the maze; _this_ , the destruction of everything else Bruce loves; _this_ , the cruellest thing someone has ever done to Bruce.)

"I wanted you to see this," Jeremiah adds softly. He finally turns away to tip Jerome's limp body into the grave with the edge of his foot, then gestures the Maniax to drag Bruce closer to it, forcing him to peer down at the sprawled body in the grave. Jeremiah lingers close enough to rest a claiming hand upon Bruce's shoulder, which he promptly does. " Look. You were right all along, Bruce," he adds with a faint, awful amusement. "My brother really is very dead. He can _never_ touch you again."

Bruce looks at him sharply. There's something disgustingly familiar in his tone, something that without the shield of Jeremiah's contact lenses Bruce can see clearly as jealousy. 

Jealous of the scars, of Selina and Alfred, but most of all, jealous of _Jerome_. 

It adds a sickening spin on the location, the grave yawning open before Bruce, the body kicked within it like garbage.

"You're sick," Bruce whispers over the pounding of his heart. "The gas -- "

It has to be. No matter what Jeremiah says.

"No, no, Bruce, I've told you. Cosmetic changes only. This -- " Jeremiah turns to him, gesturing at himself. "This came before that. And you saw it too, from the first time you spoke to me, you knew exactly how to motivate me, and it wasn't with altruism, was it, Bruce?" Jeremiah's expression bleeds into something so darkly adoring Bruce feels his skin crawl across his flesh. "You saw me."

"No -- "

"Yes," Jeremiah insists, rolling his shoulders impatiently. He half-turns back to the grave, drawing Bruce's attention with an abstract gesture. "Now, Jerome? _Jerome_ was crazy. The things he wanted to do to you, Bruce . . ." Jeremiah grimaces. "He wanted to have you slathered in honey and eaten alive by locust beetles. Amongst _other_ things." 

When Jeremiah's gaze returns, as it always must, to Bruce, his acidic eyes are scorching. In comparison, when it comes, his voice is surprisingly soft. "But that's not what _I_ want, Bruce. I only want what you promised me. I want you to stay by my side."

Shock and disbelief steals Bruce's voice. For a moment, he thinks he must have heard wrong -- that Jeremiah couldn't possibly want -- think-- 

But he does, Bruce realises with an icy chill sweeping through him under Jeremiah's expectant stare. He does want. He does hope.

"You're insane," Bruce repeats, voice so hoarse with horror it cracks -- humiliatingly, brokenly -- in the middle. "I am going to stop you."

"I really wish you wouldn't try." Jeremiah's hand comes down on his shoulder again, and Bruce strains between the urge to surge forward in fury or lean as far away as possible. With his ghostly white face and searing eyes, Jeremiah looks like the distorted ghost of Bruce's friend, especially when he learns forward to murmur in bizarrely intimate tones: "But I understand. You aren't ready for that yet. Until then, though -- to better scars, Bruce."

As is becoming common with Jeremiah, Bruce never sees the blow coming. 

Until he wakes up in Jerome's grave, blood running into his eyes from a wound that would surely scar to match, with the other man's wild, ear-splitting laughter ringing in his ears, and the knowledge that Alfred was right, has always been right, all along.

There has always been a shadow between him and Jeremiah. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter is already written and should be posted on Wednesday. Let me know your thoughts!


	2. Chapter 2

_iiii._

On the walkway above a spitting vat of acid -- in an alleyway with a beaming gunman and a string of fallen pearls -- Bruce's grief and horror and guilt finally spirals into rage. He strikes Jeremiah's knife aside; he knocks him onto his back on the rickety platform; straddling the other man's legs, Bruce hits him again and again and again until Jeremiah's deranged, childish glee begins to crack. 

Bruce is blind to it, deaf to their shared gasping breaths, numb to how Jeremiah's hand claws at his thigh as if to burrow its way inside and pull him closer, closer, as Jeremiah had once beckoned.

Somehow, through the pounding in Bruce's ears, Jeremiah's insistent voice pierces through: "You feel it, the connection between us!"

Jeremiah's jaw rolls _into_ Bruce's next blow with a grunt, and his burning eyes are deadlocked on Bruce through it all, brighter even than the white-hot fury alight in Bruce's mind.

"Bruce, you feel this!" Jeremiah demands, and Bruce hits him so hard sensation filters back in: pain shoots up his knuckles, up his leg where Jeremiah clutches at him, up his chest at the way Jeremiah strains up towards him still. 

And this time Jeremiah's demand cracks, with a gasp, into something like a plea: "Tell me you feel it!"

But Bruce has no more pity left to give, because he _had_ felt it, he does, and look what they've done to Gotham, look what it's done to _them?_ His childhood home in flames. Alfred's torture, abduction, brainwashing. Selina's shattered spine. All in aid of a madman's sick desire to destroy any part of Bruce's life that exists outside of himself.

It's time for Bruce to use the shadows to _his_ advantage.

Fingers curl into Jeremiah's lapels, hauling him up, as Bruce leans in, with a roll of his hips to echo what he knows Jeremiah wants. Close enough to kiss. Close enough to destroy them both. "You mean _nothing to me."_ And, even as he feels his body rise with the soundless breath Jeremiah sucks in, Bruce twists the knife as hard as he can: "You'll never even be my _enemy_ , Jeremiah. Jerome was the nightmare that will haunt Gotham. You're just a _pale imitation_."

Close as he is, Bruce can't help but see the instant the insult lands. 

Beneath him, Jeremiah's head reels back as if from a harder blow than any Bruce has ever dealt him, and as Bruce watches something -- some small measure of restraint -- _splinters_ in Jeremiah's eyes. For a long moment, just enough time for the hair on the back of Bruce's neck rise in an almost prophetic dread, Jeremiah lays absolutely and completely still. 

Almost as if Bruce has killed him. 

And then Jeremiah begins to _laugh._ Wrecked and awful, wild and wounded, tearing violently enough through his chest to rattle through Bruce's bones above him. The sound tears through his rage and leaves behind only a strange, keening sort of alarm.

"No," Jeremiah gasps, and then he snarls, " _No_!"

The crash of Jeremiah's head into his sends Bruce reeling up and away. He keeps to his feet and reflexively punches Jeremiah, a knockout blow that Jeremiah lunges right through as if it had never landed to flatten Bruce against the railing with the enduring strength of the truly desperate. 

Dimly, distantly, over the roar of blood in his ears, Bruce's surprised Jeremiah is even still conscious. 

But it's as if Jeremiah feels none of it, from the bruising already darkening his jaw to the blood welling from his lips, as his wild, mad eyes scours Bruce's face for assent, for validation, for some sort of reciprocation. Growing wilder, madder when they find none.

" _How can you say that_?" Jeremiah demands somewhere over the blood pounding in Bruce's ears, looking more undone than Bruce has ever seen him. "How can you even say that! Why don't you _understand_? You saw me, you always did, from the day we met! You always knew what I was! Jerome is _nothing_ , nothing compared to _me_! None of them are -- none of them could _ever_ complete you like I do!"

It's jealousy as bitter and corrosive as the vat of acid yawning below them, and Bruce watches Jeremiah drown in it. 

When Jeremiah begins to snarl about jokes and punchlines, when he slams Bruce back into the railing again and again in a blind rage, and when Bruce feels the rail beginning to bend under his weight, the sharp keening dread in his gut thrills higher still, reverberating through his being like his mother's dying scream. 

_We're going to kill each other_ , Bruce knows as suddenly as he'd known his parents were dead with that first shot. _If this doesn't stop, we're going to kill each other_. 

And, just like that, Bruce isn't frozen anymore.

He shoves Jeremiah back, dodges under the other man's punch, and as Jeremiah twists, crashing backwards into the faulty raining, as he begins to fall --

Bruce drags him back up, up, up, the enduring strength of the truly desperate.

This time, when they fall, they fall together onto the walkway, crash landing as one.

Jeremiah lands on his back, and Bruce's teeth clip his tongue so deep he tastes blood, head thumping down on Jeremiah's chest, over the other man's hammering heart: pounding like a faulty generator, ready to blow, flinging shrapnel across the width of Gotham city. 

Below them, metal hisses and bubbles into nothingness in a deathly green glow as poisonous as the fate they had almost met. 

For a full minute in the chemical plant, all is silent but for their gasping breaths. 

Slowly, gradually, Bruce feels the blood in his ears draining away, leaving them echoing only with the still frantic tempo of Jeremiah's heart against his cheek. Arms curl around him, tight, pinning, and a pair of gloved hands drag slowly, covetously, up his back. A breath brushes over the top of his head, lips moving against the pistol-whip scar on his hairline. 

“Why would you say that, darling?" Jeremiah whispers. Fixated as ever. So careless about his brush with death. "How could you say that?”

With what feels like a truly monumental amount of effort, Bruce drags his head up, off Jeremiah's chest, to look at him.

_I am the answer to your life's question! Without me you're just a joke without a punchline!_

Jeremiah still wears the same look on his face as he'd had in the poisonous glow of the corrosive acid around them: face blanched, eyes desolate, under a looming wave of fury on the verge of cracking -- alongside whatever sanity is still left to him -- into despair.

Bruce isn't sure he can pull him back up this time.

So he says nothing.

It's a shockingly easy thing to do in the end, in this moment, still trembling with adrenaline, to lean in and press his lips to Jeremiah's.

 _You almost died_ , Bruce thinks, still dizzy with horror, in the instant where Jeremiah lies stunned. He hasn't forgiven him, he'll never forgive him, but terror numbs Bruce's rage, and he almost doesn't care anymore that this is the worst choice he could possibly make, because --

 _You almost **died**_.

For a moment, the kiss is surprisingly chaste, achingly tender, like a dream of who Bruce had once convinced himself Jeremiah was.

And then the real Jeremiah comes alive beneath him with a faint, rough noise.

He surges up into Bruce's body like a drowning man desperate for air, lips moving against lips. The rasp of stubble over Bruce's skin sends sparks shooting through his body. Jeremiah's tongue sweeps over the seam of Bruce's lips until they part and he licks his way, inexpertly but hungrily, into Bruce's mouth with a muffled whine. The noise sends a wave of searing heat down Bruce's spine, pooling between his legs as his cock begins to harden. He can taste Jeremiah's blood from the split in his lip, and Jeremiah sucks greedily at the blood from Bruce's bitten tongue, letting it all mix: interchangeable, inescapable, inevitable.

Covetous hands turn nakedly possessive, Jeremiah's arms tightening like a vice around Bruce's body, pulling him further down into Jeremiah's own. One hand drags down to Bruce's hips, gripping there hard, and the other rakes through Bruce's hair, fisting tightly enough that extraction -- escape -- from the ferocious kiss, from any part of this, becomes impossible.

Jeremiah shifts beneath him, lining their bodies up perfectly, and Bruce rolls his hips instinctively above him, grinding down into him. The kiss breaks with the way their breaths hitch together, leaving them gasping raggedly into each other's mouths. Forehead to forehead, their eyes catch, and Bruce feels his blood running hotter still at the way Jeremiah stares back at him, eyes nearly black: breathless, mesmerised, ravenous.

"Bruce," he says hoarsely, reverently, and Jeremiah's hand slides from his hair to cup Bruce's face, trembling, tender. " _Bruce._ "

They're both already hard. 

Bruce grinds down, and Jeremiah's voice cuts off with a strangled groan. Bruce keeps going as the heat begins to blaze brighter, tighter, hotter between his legs until his cock aches with it. Jeremiah writhes like a man on a livewire beneath him, bucking up into him hard, lips parted in the ghastly light of the chemicals below, those strange eyes rolling wildly, ecstatically, _rapturously_ over Bruce's face from mere inches away. _Out of control_ , Bruce thinks hazily, pressing their foreheads harder together until Jeremiah is the only thing he can see. Not just out of Bruce's control, as he has always seemed, but finally, completely, utterly out of his own too.

"Let me -- let me touch you, Bruce, let me -- " Jeremiah gasps, voice tipping away into a groan at the next roll of Bruce's hips, and the hand on his waist begins to fumble at the button to Bruce's pants.

Even through the cloth, the touch of Jeremiah's hand makes Bruce's rhythm stutter and quicken, heat sparking brighter between his legs.

Despite that, Jeremiah insists hoarsely, "Bruce, tell me you want this -- tell me you want me —" 

Bruce's breath hitches. He licks his lips. "I want this," he admits roughly. He feels like he too has gone utterly mad, because his head is spinning so fast that there's no shame. No guilt. Nothing but this. "I want _you."_

A sound rips itself from Jeremiah's throat that Bruce has never heard anyone make before: guttural and soft: agonized and joyful. 

He'd made less noise when Selina had stabbed him.

Unable to control himself, Bruce attacks the belt to Jeremiah's suit pants, flicking open the button, dragging down both the zipper and his hand over the swell of the other man's arousal to a hushed, muffled curse from Jeremiah.

The hand on Bruce's face tightens briefly, flits away, and Bruce's eyes flicker down to the white flash of teeth as Jeremiah rips one glove off, then switches it for the other as soon as he yanks Bruce's zipper down. Naked now, one hand returns to his face, a calloused thumb tracking the line of his cheekbone with a dizzying tenderness, creeping up to thumb possessively at the scar he'd inflicted near Bruce's hairline. 

( _But until_ _then,_ Jeremiah's voice whispers awfully in his ear, _to better scars, Bruce_.)

Before Bruce can react, Jeremiah pauses only to lick at his other hand -- a quick dart of his tongue that makes Bruce's remembered fury waver -- before it flies between Bruce's legs. His boxers are impatiently pushed down his hips, freeing Bruce's flushed, aching cock into the cool factory air for the split second before Jeremiah's slick palm curls around him.

Bruce jolts helplessly at the sensation of it, fingers spasming overtop Jeremiah's clothed cock, and he feels Jeremiah trembling through the hard press of their foreheads together, sharing air through each other's mouths. 

" _Jeremiah._ "

Jeremiah draws in a particularly ragged breath at the sound of his name, and his hand begins to move. The rough drag of his calluses and the deft twist of his clever hands -- the pleasure-pain of it -- has the heat between Bruce's legs coiling tighter and tighter, hotter and hotter. He's close enough to come undone: close enough to _Jeremiah_ to feel the other man's fixated, unblinking stare moving frantically over his own face: close enough to hear the shattered noise he makes when Bruce's hand slips into his boxers and touches his slick, heated cock for the very first time, stroking the precum over the head and down the shaft. 

Head still ringing faintly with the memory of the graveyard, Bruce fumbles for a shred of sanity. He manages to force out: "Jim -- Jim might walk in. If we don't stop."

As if it wouldn't take something beyond divine intervention to stop Jeremiah now with Bruce's attention finally his own.

As if it isn't over a year too late for Bruce to stop himself now. 

"Good," Jeremiah breathes, sounding drunk on it all. "Let him see. Let them _all_ see us." His tone bleeds into something fervent and desperately earnest. "They wouldn't live long enough to part us ever again, Bruce." When Bruce's grip tightens on him to the point past pain in response, Jeremiah only makes another breathless noise and leans up into him harder still, like he'd take everything Bruce might give, pleasure and pain, good and bad, so long as all of it came from all of him.

"I won't let them," Jeremiah continues, with the faintest, most tender of snarls creeping into his tone. "Unlike the others that claim to love you, I'll _never_ let you go."

Bruce hates -- _hates_ \-- the way Jeremiah's shameless, possessive tone brings him hurtling closer to that looming precipice. How his dark and devoted words make the loneliest corners of his heart soar. His back begins to curl, the heat begins to flare a supernova, and his weight sinks down into Jeremiah's waiting form. Eyes screwed shut, Bruce thrusts helplessly into Jeremiah's tight grasp —

"Look at me," Jeremiah hisses, breath fanning out across his face. "Look at _me_ , Bruce."

And Bruce does look at him: the bleach-white skin flushed almost back to humanity, the unmistakable acidic eyes less than an inch from his own, the all-consuming, burning want and hope and hunger of him.

— and he shatters into pieces.

Shuddering through the throes of an orgasm that thunders through him, from head to toe, in a wave of white-hot convulsing heat, gasping raggedly as he spills into the former engineer's hand, Bruce holds Jeremiah's awe-stricken stare — the vulnerable part of his lips; the harder press of forehead to forehead as if to burrow closer still — for as long as he can, before the rising tide of pleasure washes his awareness away.

"Beautiful," Jeremiah is murmuring reverently when the ringing finally recedes from his ears, almost crooning, almost sighing. Bruce's throat tightens so much at the gentleness that his eyes burn. His chest aches in a way that is almost as lovely as it is painful. "You're so _beautiful_ , Bruce, darling -- _darling_ \-- "

Jeremiah sounds dazed, cock thrusting hard through Bruce's slick, loosened grip, helplessly, erratically, needy, and Bruce wants — needs — to see him come utterly undone. 

With pleasure and joy rather than agony and jealousy. 

On the next stroke, Bruce twists his wrist just so and shifts his hips just enough that on Jeremiah's next thrust brings the head of his cock sliding against the bared skin of Bruce's hips, smearing wetly across his skin. 

In response Jeremiah makes a choked, stricken whine, back _arching_ as if electrified, and he begins to rut unsteadily into Bruce's skin with ragged, wrecked breaths. The hand drops from Bruce's face and crashes to the small of his back, dragging Bruce closer into the jerky, hurried thrusts of his hips, clutching at him like the last port in a ferocious storm. Before long Jeremiah's body begins to convulse, grinding their foreheads together, and he comes with a frantic gasp of Bruce's name and a flurry of hard, claiming kisses across the span of Bruce's flushed face until their mouths find their way back to each other in the middle. 

At the small of Bruce's back, Jeremiah's grasping hand spasms, flexes, on Bruce's back, utterly intractable and tight enough to bruise to the bones of him — of them — of _this_ , and for a long time, neither of them let go.

_v._

Eventually, in the aftermath once their hips still, and the endorphins begin to trickle away from their slackened forms, Bruce feels the awful creeping awareness of reality begin to dawn —

(Of his still flushed cheeks and pounding heart, of his aching scalp and swollen lips, of the superficial knife slice dealt in the alleyway and fingertip bruises clawed into his skin.)

— of what he's done. Of who he's done it with. Of what the man whose chest he sprawls upon now, rising and falling with Jeremiah's unsteady breathing, tried to do to him, to Detective Gordon, to _Gotham_ mere hours ago. 

The afterglow dissipates, fizzling out of existence as the railing had in the vat of acid, leaving only the yawning opening to disaster in its place, just to the right of where they had landed, where they still lay, in the middle ground between safety and ruin. High above the seething acid pit below, Bruce makes a grasp for safety and shoves up off of Jeremiah's chest, ignoring the man’s grunt. 

He scrubs the lipstick from his mouth, buttons his pants, and goes to stand. Before he can, Jeremiah bolts upright, as if he'd been waiting for this very moment despite all appearance of respite, and hauls Bruce back down into his lap, back down to his lips, back down to his hungry grasping hands.

"Stay," Jeremiah hisses, entreating, biting at the firmly closed line of Bruce's mouth hard enough to sting, before Bruce jerks his head away. To Bruce's surprise, Jeremiah only laughs, a faintly vicious, almost wondrous, sound. "Oh Bruce, I had almost begun to fear you destroyed this."  
  
It's so like Jeremiah, to be clever enough to know this had still been possible at all and utterly unable to connect himself to the damage he'd caused.  
  
"No," Bruce says roughly but tiredly, "You’re the one who did that."

It's been a long night — an awful year — and there's miles yet to go before Gotham could ever be safe.

Jeremiah makes an irate noise at his response, grip tightening so hard around Bruce's waist that Bruce is tempted to strike him again, if he could only be sure that the resulting brawl would stay such or that Jeremiah would even let go in the first place. "Everything I've been _doing_ this year has all been for your benefit, Bruce," he insists. "To help free you from the silly little restrictions you've allowed others to place on you." Jeremiah's stare darkens, something pulling tighter in his jaw at speaking of the influence others have had on Bruce. Almost as if to himself, he adds, "I had thought that my little production with your parents would do it, if only that little _street rat_ hadn't -- "

"Don't. Don't mention that."

He digs his fingers into Jeremiah's restraining arms. He knows better, after Jeremiah's earlier jealous fury, after what he'd done to Selina's spine, that she'd only suffer if he protests on her behalf. He knows, now, after the sickening caricatures of his parents, that there are no limits to the resulting cruelty of Jeremiah's delusional attempts to consume him, to keep him. 

"Of course, darling," Jeremiah says soothingly. His grasp squeezes a little tighter, then relaxes a minute amount in a gesture that might have been comforting, but for the intense, heated way his reverent eyes drag over Bruce's face. "There's no need for that now," he whispers softly, tilting his head back to look at Bruce better. His face was incandescent. "I was prepared to be hated by you, so long as you at least hated me best of all, but there's no need for that anymore. I gave up hope too easily after Ra's death, I can see that now." 

A wide, eerie smile twitches pulls at the corners of Jeremiah's mouth. 

And then Bruce already knows, with all the terrible instinct before a calamitous fall, that after this Jeremiah will be worse than he ever was before. Now that he has that wild, terrible hope again. 

He'll never give up. 

Unless he can be stopped.

Or rather slowed, at least, in the only way Bruce could ever bear to do so. Especially so soon after Jeremiah's near fall, the prospect of his death. 

Licking his suddenly dry lips, swallowing at the way Jeremiah's eyes track the movement, Bruce forces himself to quietly ask: "Jeremiah, what do you want from me?" 

For a moment, Jeremiah's eyes flare with surprise. "Everything," he says candidly at first, but with a slowly rising intensity. "I want everything from you, Bruce, and I want to be everything to you as you are to me. I want to be the one who destroys you, and I want to be the one who rebuilds you. I want to haunt your every thought, I want to be the face you see every time you close your eyes, more than some random gunman in an alley: more than that little bitch or your brash butler: more than my dead _idiot_ of a brother. I want to consume you as much as you consume me. I want you to _love me_ as much as I do you."

Bruce closes his eyes in the closest thing to a flinch he allows himself. 

He'd known, of course; he'd known Jeremiah thought he loved him, that he maybe even did as best as he still could. But he could never have prepared himself for how much it hurts to hear the words in the same breath as the awful things Jeremiah had done earlier this night. How much his heart would startle, and his stomach would tighten, full of nausea and an immovable, shameful joy. 

"Because I do, Bruce," Jeremiah says dreamily. Bruce feels Jeremiah lean in to nuzzle his throat, shamelessly, painfully, adoring. His voice ghosts across Bruce's skin: "You are the one, the only thing, I've ever loved.” 

Before he can react any further to Jeremiah's words, Bruce makes himself whisper: "I don't know if I can do that.”

Beneath him, Jeremiah goes quiet and dangerously, familiarly, still. Exactly as he had done after Bruce's ill-advised, provoking words about Jerome. Still unhinged enough from that not to immediately bulldoze through any protests as he might have otherwise have done.

It's only the thought of that particular brand of Jeremiah's wildness loose in Gotham that compels Bruce to carry on.

"No, let me finish," Bruce says, and he opens his eyes to meet Jeremiah's heated stare. "I don't know if anyone can love like you do." He doesn't know if anyone _should_. Not when he remembers how destructive Jeremiah's love has been, how he'd leaned into every blow Bruce dealt like he wanted nothing else, his lovesick face when he'd finally touched Bruce's skin. Jeremiah's love is a fire that burns both ways, and that makes the honesty of his next words a little easier to swallow. "But I do . . . I want us to stop hurting each other."

And Gotham.

He needs them both to stop hurting Gotham. 

At his words, Jeremiah's expression darkens in offense. "You won't _let me_ do anything but hurt you, Bruce. I offered for you to be my best friend, and you threw it back in my face. I offered to become your worst enemy, and you said I meant nothing to you! Worse than that, you said —" A harsh laugh tumbles out of Jeremiah's mouth. The sound is inching towards something dangerous again, as is the gradual tightening of his arms around Bruce, a snake constricting before it unhinges its jaw. "But you lied, of course, you just don't _understand_ yet — "

"I'm offering now," Bruce cuts in desperately.

Jeremiah falls silent, eyes flashing. His breathing had spread up again, and he scours Bruce's face for deceit. Licks his lips when he finds none. "It occurs to me," he says slowly, a little sardonically, but his fingers burrow deeper into the fabric of Bruce's coat, "That you'll have conditions?"

Ones Jeremiah would no doubt try to bend to fit his own wants. For all his madness, Jeremiah has never been anything less than the cleverest man Bruce has ever known.

But Bruce knows now Jeremiah wants him desperately enough that any rejection unhinges him: enough to move carefully: enough to do all he can to keep Bruce. 

Jeremiah's love is a monstrous thing, selfish and all-consuming enough to raze Gotham down: stronger even than the fear that had once compelled him to cage himself in that bunker for six years. And Bruce - Bruce still looks at him, in all his monstrosity, and _wants._

(Maybe Jeremiah's right. Maybe he always has.)

"Yes," Bruce says in the end. It feels like a free fall. "I do. Do you want to hear them?"

And -- because there's a strange heavy feeling in the air, because the guarded fascination and wariness in Jeremiah's face reminds him painfully of the day they met, when Bruce had dangled the hope of the thing he wanted most before his eyes to lure Jeremiah to his eventual ruin -- he finds himself offering Jeremiah his hand.

Slowly, inevitably, Jeremiah's hand folds around his, a hold more than a shake, but it feels like it could be another start. 

( _For safety,_ Bruce thinks, _or for ruin_?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who read, bookmarked, subscribed, and especially to those who commented or left kudos on this. My first Gotham baby ❤️
> 
> I was going to wait to publish this until Wednesday but I'm an impulsive loon. Please comment and let me know what you thought of this, if you'd like a continuation, all that fun stuff!

**Author's Note:**

> [Come find me on Tumblr!](https://bambiegaze.tumblr.com/)


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